Obama’s and Romney’s Reports Each Point Up Vulnerabilities as the Campaigns Turn Toward the General Election

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Spokespersons for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been talking in public about how well their candidates have been doing raising money for the general election campaign. Privately, however, they must know that the fundraising numbers for April showed each of the candidates to have vulnerabilities the campaigns will want to address quickly. In some respects, they have already begun to do so.

Romney’s vulnerability in the reports through April lies with his principal campaign committee’s fundraising.
“The campaign committee is a more responsive tool for campaign strategists to use than the political party,” said Michael J. Malbin, the
Campaign Finance Institute’s Executive Director. “And both the campaign committee and party are far more dependable than an independent expenditure committee.” For Obama, the vulnerability is just the opposite: his principal campaign committee’s fundraising is still going strong, but the supporting cast is not yet in place.

ROMNEY

Flat Fundraising month: Mitt Romney’s supporters did not show the kind of enthusiasm for contributing to his campaign that others have received
after clinching their party’s nomination. The Romney campaign raised $11.7 million in April
(see Table 1). This was less than the $12.0 million the campaign raised in February or the $13.1 million in March.

Romney’s flat fundraising stands in sharp contrast to two other candidates in the recent past. The point of these comparisons is not to focus on absolute numbers (though these too are not in Romney’s favor) but to look at what the month-to-month comparisons say about supporters’ enthusiasm.

John McCain raised $12.4 million in January 2008 and $11.2 million in February. He wrapped up the nomination for all practical purposes
in February and mathematically in March. McCain’s receipts then went up 38% (to $15.4 million) in March and another 21% (to $18.6 million) in April.

John Kerry’s performance in 2004 was even more dramatic. Kerry raised $4.1 million in January (plus self-financing) and $8.5 million in February. He wrapped up the nomination in early March. Kerry’s fundraising then surged to $44.2 million in March, more than five times as much as February. He raised another $32.1 million in April.

Small-Large Donors: Romney’s lack of a surge in April was consistent with his mix of small and large donors. Mitt Romney has raised 62% of his money
from donors whose contributions have cumulated to the maximum legal amount of $2,500. He received an additional 17% from donors who gave $1,000-$2,499.
In contrast, only 10% of Romney’s primary campaign contributions have come from donors who gave him a total of $200 or less
(see Table 3). While this is a slight improvement from March, it still fails to show a strong level of enthusiasm among the kinds of donors who typically are also willing to become campaign volunteers. This small-donor performance is markedly different from John Kerry’s and George W. Bush’s in 2004, both of whose small contributions picked up sharply after Kerry became the presumptive nominee.

Political Parties and Super PACs: Of course, the candidate’s campaign is only one part of the full picture in 2012. Political parties are allowed
to spend unlimited amounts on independent spending to support a candidate (or attack an opponent) as well as on generic party advertising and voter mobilization.
The Republican National Committee reported raising $11.4 million in April
(see Table 7), which was less than the RNC raised in April 2008 ($19.8 million) or 2004 ($22.1 million). However, Romney also formed a joint fundraising committee in March, which has said it will report quarterly rather than monthly. We can roughly estimate tis committee’s receipts from statements the campaign has made publicly. The campaign said that the party and campaign had raised a combined $40 million in March. If we subtract the candidate’s and RNC’s reported receipts from the total, it suggests that the joint committee had raised and not yet transferred about $17 million. Some of this presumably would go the RNC while other portions might go to state party committees in battleground states.

The Republican campaign will also benefit from independent expenditure committees, popularly called Super PACs. Restore Our Future, the committee specifically
supporting the Romney campaign, raised a cumulative total of $56.5 million through April 30. It made $46.5 million in independent expenditures as of May 20
(see Table 6). In addition, several independent spending committees that support Republican candidates more generally (including American Crossroads) have said they would spend millions of dollars to support Romney’s election.

While this independent spending on balance is likely to help Romney, it is not an unmixed blessing. Last week, it was revealed that one supporter was planning a
multi-million dollar ad campaign through his independent committee to revive President Obama’s former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue.
The Romney campaign quickly denounced the effort. The incident reminds us that money spent by an independent committee is less helpful to a candidate than
money the candidate can control directly. The lack of an April surge by the
candidate’s committee therefore points to a vulnerability the campaign should want to address.

OBAMA

President Obama’s campaign raised $26.6 million in April. While this was behind Obama’s pace of April 2008, the situations are not comparable.
In 2008 Obama was still running in contested primaries and was not raising money for the Democratic National Committee. This April 30 the Obama campaign
had nearly ten times as much cash on hand as Mr. Romney’s
(see Table 1). Forty-three percent of Obama’s money has come from donors giving a total of $200 or less. Only 29% came from donors who gave the campaign $1,000 or more. So the Obama campaign committee’s fundraising remains strong.

The vulnerabilities show up more in the party and PAC numbers. President Obama’s joint fundraising committee has helped the DNC raise $185.8 million through April 30, 2012.
This is more than twice as much as the DNC raised through April of either 2004 or 2008. It was also well ahead of the RNC’s reported $135.1 million.
The problem is not the DNC’s fundraising but that the DNC had higher expenditures and less cash on hand than the RNC. In addition, the DNC’s funds include joint
fundraising dollars, whereas the RNC’s does not yet do so.

In addition, the Super PAC identified with Obama (Priorities USA) has raised a cumulative total of only $10.6 million through April.
The campaign may not need or want to depend on a Super PAC, since the campaign will have greater control over party and candidate spending.
But the low Super PAC fundraising heightens the importance of the continued success in candidate and party fundraising for the Obama campaign.

Table 7. National Party Committees Receipts, Debts and Cash for April 2012 and cumulatively

The Campaign Finance Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute. Statements of the Campaign Finance Institute and its Task Forces do not necessarily reflect the views of CFI's Trustees or financial supporters.